Next October 17th and 18th will be held in Sacramrento Amiwest.How you probably know, Amiwest is the most important (and one of the few remaining) Amiga convention in the West Coast, and probably in the USA.

Sacramento is not exactly behind the corner: from L.A. : 300 miles far (700 km) and a eight hour drive car trip, or one hour airplane.

Being honest, i really owuld like to go there and even make some kind of intervention to diffuse AROS (beside the fact that probably everybody there knows it ), but actually my participation is in jeopardy for the following reasons:

- I have a very tight budget: a visit to the southwest website gave me an estimate of $335 for two people round trip, too expensive for me; then i need to look for a cheap hotel;- my wife is not into it: she might get bored and decide to make me go out before the end;- the dates will fall on friday and saturday: not practical for me, need to work friday and don't know if i can go out earllier (if i go to work: see next voice);-me and my wife are planning our religious marriage in Italy on October towards the 15th of the month (same date of civil marriage).

Anyway, this blog entry subject is strictly related to my actual (lack of) experience as AROS advocate (or, as i define myself, divulgator): i did not achieved anything interesting so far, at least from my own point of view, but guess the problem might be expanded to the fact i have no metrics to define my results:

- Bring some programmers to develop for/onAROS? so far zero: I sent two investigative e-mails to two Amiga programmers: an italian, that i found out is working on Blitz Basic and, considered that Mattathias Basic- the closest open source language to Blitz Basic and AMOS that i know- is being rewritten from scratch and not ready yet, he has no way to develop anything; the other one is the programmer of the structured language application SteamDraw on MorphOS; he said that AROS incarnation of MUI, Zune, is lacking indispensable classes and functions required for its program, so at least for now, he still like to advance under MOS.

I hope one day will decide to join us and also hope somebody will decide to improve Zune.

- Make people become interested in AROS?So far i guess I have been able to light curiosities in people that knew about its existence but were unable or maybe even lazy to get to know it better.

- Personal contribuitons to the AROS project?Programs: so far none, but things might change soon: i am interested by LUA and hope that somebody will decide to extend Zulu ( is a Lua extension that allows LUA to create MUI interfaces) with the missing tools, such as drop-down menus and lists (as referred me by Allanon in this topic in italian language on amiganews.it);

Documentation: just made two updates on wikibooks: added Portable to the list of supported languages and added the SAM-440 suport in the PPC support section, together with the mention of the Work in progress on EFIKA (that has already reached the boot loader stage: see here);

Viral Marketing? Thought a lot aobut it but so far done nothing; am very tempted to print small posters in Letter size and hang it in different public bulletin boards: libraries, cafeterias, starbucks, etc. using kitty, a payoff like "Put a Kitty in your PC" [see the test above] and the Aros sites web pages; am also tempted in participate to the Arosworld best promo Video Competition, inmy style obviously: using an animated Kitty over Aros screenshots and video captures, but an animaiton like that is not simple: need to write a script and it takes time; then the instruments: should i use Flash or keep an open source workflow with synfig studio, jahshaka and similars?(by the way, Kitty needs to be designed "ad hoc" in order to fit different poses, i thought to use a "paper doll" approach such the one of Lele Luzzati (see this video and this video, even better).

And to make Kitty talk? Should I ask my wife? she might like the idea?